Social Computing

Wade Roush has posted quite an interesting article (done in an interesting manner as well) titled “Social Machines” on Technology Review. In it he talks about how we are getting closer to ubiquitous computing (if I ever get my copies I’ll plug my chapter here). He points out that we are now in an era of constant connectivity and tagging of data to enable it to be found and organized by machines (that work to enhance communication and collaboration) and accessed by users in such a way that it becomes part of their lives as they use this data to socialize. This is made all the more possible by gadgets that are becoming “smart and fast” (cell phones for the most part) and that we already use to support our social lives. He also points to the movement toward “web2.0” where people are finding it easier (read: not needing to know more than how to send email) to publish online and make the web a bi-directional medium. This ease of publishing creates more to publish about as information is moving faster and faster – the recent bombings in London had the first footage from a cell phone video (maybe they are useful … hmm… pics of the Intel Macs, and now “cell ENG”) are evidence of this (interesting Wired article).

So with all that going on… what are we doing when we are not using technologies like handhelds and blogs/wikis in the classroom?

-edit:
Here is the link to the original blog form of the story.